My grandmother lived to be 97. For decades she was active in her church, had long friendships with her sorority sisters, and she even got to see all six of her grandchildren go off to college. By the time she passed, she’d done just about everything she wanted to do.
With those genes, I feel like I’ve got a good chance of living long too. But I also want to use what’s within my control to stack the deck in my favor.
There’s a whole movement of people who are working to extend their lives, and some of them are going to extremes. Billionaires are doing things like exchanging plasma with their sons and funding organ replacement research. But for those of us who aren’t ultra-wealthy and like our science fiction to remain fictional, there are still ways to set ourselves up for success.
One source of hope may be the shingles vaccine. My colleague Bryan Walsh, who writes Vox’s Good News newsletter, says he brought it up at his own doctor’s appointment recently.
“This began with a study that happened in Wales a few years ago where there was an age cutoff among people who were eligible to get this vaccine,” he told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “What they found was that the vaccinated group was 20 percent less likely to develop dementia over the seven years following getting that vaccine.”
While other studies have replicated the findings, the results still aren’t conclusive. Researchers are still trying to figure out what it is about the shingles vaccine that makes people less likely to develop dementia. One possibility, Bryan says, is that “the immune-boosting effect of these vaccines may protect yourself against whatever it is that’s connected with dementia. So it’s almost like it has a side effect that would be really, really helpful. That’s a big effect if that actually holds.”
While there’s plenty still to learn about the shingles vaccine, there are also some more concrete ways to achieve longevity, and you can implement them in your day-to-day life. Bryan tells us his top four in this week’s episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
What are you doing to live longer and to live better?
There’s this whole field of longevity science which goes for real sci-fi things — swapping out blood, or are we going to create new organs. That may or may not actually pan out, but there’s things everyone can do right now to really help themselves. Starting a countdown, I’d say, just be social.
As we get older, isolation does tend to set in. Some studies have found that people who are socially isolated have something like a 32 percent higher risk of early death. You can actually see it sometimes in imaging studies. So whatever you can do to begin to work up more social connections or maintain the ones you have — because just like your body tends to break down as you get older, those social connections can too. Not only will that ideally help protect your brain for the long term, but also it will make you happier.
Hanging out with friends, check. What else?
Eating is definitely a big one. While nutrition science is like very difficult to follow and often sort of flips from one fad to another, there’s really a lot of evidence that the Mediterranean diet — which is basically a diet that uses olive oil rather than butter, a lot of vegetables, whole grains, fish as the protein, very little red meat — has been found to have an impact on reducing cancer, heart disease, and even serious cognitive decline.
Some saturated fat, some dairy is actually probably fine. But would I eat steak every day? Apparently RFK [Jr.] does. I would not.
What’s another thing that we could be doing to live longer?
Get strong. What we’re learning is that when it comes to work that can be done on the body to ensure that you have a body that can last for the distance, strength training is really important.
Basically, after your 20s, muscle mass will continually fall. If you build it now, it’s like banking more. You can lose that later, which unfortunately is inevitable, but you can put it off as long as possible by building muscle right now.
That brings me to something really important here, which is that when we talk about longevity, it’s not necessarily the final number that you hit. What people really want to maximize and really focus on is what we call healthspan, which is the number of years you have a healthy life. The good eating, the social connection, the strength training helps to maximize and make those years as long as possible.
If you did not start lifting in your 20s, are you cooked? Is it so over for you?
It’s never over. It’s literally never too late. Any bit helps with that. You do not have to work out like Hugh Jackman and at like 4:40 in the morning and deadlift 500 pounds.
An hour of resistance work a week will get you most of the benefit you need. And you don’t have to be crazy about it, but you do have to do it.
What is your No. 1 recommendation to fight Father Time?
It is sleep. It, weirdly, is the hardest one. Literally all you do is lie down and close your eyes. But that really is the difference. It’s probably the most neuroprotective thing you can do for your brain on a regular basis. And beyond that, what’s really important is not just getting lots of sleep, but trying to get deep sleep specifically. Deep sleep seems to be the one that really has the neuroprotective effect against dementia and things like that.
Wake up and go to sleep at a consistent time and the sleep generally will follow. You can look at a tracker, trackers can be helpful, but don’t overindex on it, because I think sometimes people get a little crazy about it.
Over time you will see the deep sleep creep up along with the consistent sleep. And again, you will feel better on a day-to-day basis, guaranteed. I think we all know the difference between getting enough sleep and not getting enough sleep. This doesn’t just help you now, but it will help you for decades in the future as well.
At times I can be skeptical of longevity strategies. All of these things are part of a healthy lifestyle, yes, but it’s really easy to fixate and to let it become your whole life, to the point that you’re so busy working on living a longer life that you’re not enjoying the things that make life worth living. How do you think about that?
That’s where the social connection part fits in. That underscores the things that make a good life. I don’t just mean a life where I’m trying to maximize the length of it, but literally the life I’m living in the moment. What I’m focusing on is, I want to feel good now. You could be the most longevity-obsessed wellness influencer and a terrible thing can happen to you at 55. That’s why you should like what you’re doing.
With all these things, whether it’s the diet, whether it’s the sleep, whether it’s exercise, find ways that you want to do them because if you feel like you’re just forcing yourself to do it, you’re not going to.
